CLASSIC ROCK
'Lost songs' unearthed - including duets featuring Michael Jackson.
BRIAN MAY HAS revealed that there will be another Queen album, which will feature previously unreleased recordings made by the band's late signer Freddie Mercury.
"I never thought this would happen," the guitarist tells Classic Rock. "But I think we have some very interesting material. It's very exciting."
With the project still in early stages of development. May is cagey about revealing details of which songs will appear on the album or even a release date. But he confirms that he and drummer Roger Taylor are currently sifting through a variety of 'lost' Queen tracks - including a number of duets featuring Mercury and Michael Jackson.
"The amount of stuff that's just washed up in the last few years is amazing," May says. "These tapes materialise from various places that had been forgotten. We knew they existed, but we hadn't paid much attention to them. But as soon as we actually researched and found all of these original tapes, we realised there was a lot more material than we had thought."
According to May, the new album will be created along similar lines to 1995's Made In Heaven, which found the surviving members of Queen completing tracks from demos that Mercury had recorded prior to his death in 1991.
"You're working with Freddie's voice, as we were with Made In Heaven," says May. "And yes, there are a lot of moments of emotional contact. Sometimes to can be hard. But you have to get past that. And after a while you do get over it and you're just working with great material. So it's worth doing."
May confirms that three duets featuring Mercury and Michael Jackson have been unearthed. There Must Be Moe To Life Than This, Victory and State Of Shock were recorded in 1983, reportedly as part of a bigger collaboration between the two singers that was eventually scuppered by their clashing schedules (although Jackson later re-recorded State Of Shock with Mick Jagger).
"We used to bump into Michael a lot on the road," says May. "He came to see Queen at Madison Square Garden and loved the production, so be 'borrowed' a few elements of our production for the Victory tour. He was quite up-front about it. You can hear there was a lot of fun being had on those songs."
Aside from the new album, May is working on other Queen-related projects. The long-awaited movie of Freddie Mercury's life is still going ahead, albeit now not with Sacha Baron Cohen, who was lined up to play the lead role. "Sacha is a very respected friend," May says, "but we came to the conclusion that it wasn't right in the end."
Drummer Roger Taylor recently said the band favoured Skyfall actor Ben Whishaw to take Baron Cohen's place. Taylor also told Classic Rock that he and May plan to perform as Queen again in the future - with or without singer Adam Lambert.
"I have reservations about calling it Queen, as you would imagine - it's something different," says May. "But Adam has a voice in a billion. Freddie would have loved it. And I'm not a person that plays guitar just to widdle. I like the guitar to be part of a creative process, making songs, and you need a singer to perform songs. We'll be looking at what the possibilities are in the future."
One casualty of this new-found activity is an anthology of lesser-known ballads compiled by May and Taylor over the past year, with the working title Queen Forever.
"That album exists in embryo," says May, "but I think we're going to shelve it. We're more interested int he material that hasn't been heard at all. That's something that's taken us over."
PE
"It's mind-blowing!"
Brian May on his new 'stereoscopic' book
BRIAN MAY has published a new 3D book, Diableries: Stereoscopic Adventures In Hell, inspired by both satirical French 19th-century cards and the guitarists's love of stereoscopy.
"Stereoscopy is 3D photography, invented the 1840s, and it has all these scenarios with skeletons and ghosts and ghouls - it's mind-blowing," says May. "And The Diableries were very seditious criticism of the regime of Napoleon III. So we combined the two and packaged it with a 3D viewer, the Owl Stereoscope, which is my own invention."
rhapsody8